Arts & Culture

PSALM 151

In his epigraph, poet Merrill Leffler raises William Carlos Williams’s bold claim that men die miserably for lack of what is in poetry. It’s a claim that many practical folks would dismiss on the face of it, for if the news of our world is purely a matter of dollars and sense, then how much could poetry matter? Leffler is in a positionRead More

Rabbinical Council Is Probing Claims of Sexual Harassment

By Rukhl Schaechter

The main union of Modern Orthodox rabbis is investigating allegations of sexual harassment against the scion of a prominent rabbinic family, the Forward has learned.Officials at the Rabbinical Council of America, an organization representing more than 1,000 Orthodox clergymen, confirmed that the organization is examining sexualRead More

New Generation of Polish Jews Insists on Future in Their Land

By Alisa Solomon

Daniela Malec’s blond hair, swept into a stretchy purple band atop her head, sprays upward like a fountain, giving her a perpetual look of amazement. Add her blazing blue eyes, and the 26-year-old Jewish activist looks punk prophetic. “What does it really mean to be a Jew?” she asks, naming the issue that fires her and about 20 other youngRead More

Old Soldiers Who Never Fade: Peres Runs as Laborites Rebel

By Ofer Shelah

TEL AVIV — As the latest power struggle in Israel’s Labor Party unfolds, it is hard to tell without a peek at the calendar whether the year is 2004, 1994 or even 1984.There is Shimon Peres, 81, hardly changed in his looks from the energetic prime minister of two decades ago, hotly debating with his would-be challengers for leadershipRead More

Survivor: Rosh Hashanah

By Katherine Brodsky

Reality TV casting call: One Jewish family needed, substantially observant and slightly neurotic, for test of strategy and endurance. There will be no island to get kicked off of and no cow’s testicles to eat, but you may have to face… the bar mitzvah caterer.That’s right, folks, someone finally realized what a challenge it is toRead More

The Work of a Worthy Diarist

By Allan Nadler

The Journals of Yaacov Zipper, 1950-1982: The Struggle for Yiddishkayt Translated from the Yiddish and edited by Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle McGill/Queens University Press, 192 pages, $39.95. * * *The appearance of the random, private journals of the obscure principal of a Canadian Yiddish school does not suggest an auspiciousRead More

Where Have All the Jews Gone?

By Norman Ravvin

When Toronto-based writer Matt Cohen died in 1999, he had just completed a memoir titled, “Typing: A Life in 26 Keys” (Random House, Canada 2000). Alongside its sharply drawn portrait of the Toronto literary and counter-cultural scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Typing” included a provocative challenge to the CanadianRead More

Gleanings

Below is an excerpt from “Survivors: Seven Short Stories,” by Chava Rosenfarb, which will be out this October from Cormorant Books Inc. I was happy to emigrate to Canada, which I considered a land “far from God and from people” — by which I meant former concentration camp inmates — where I would be unlikely ever to be confronted byRead More

A Boatload of Languor And Dreaminess

By Josh Lambert

House on the River: A Summer Journey By Nessa Rapoport Harmony Books, 146 pages, $22. ——–In literature’s most ambitious exploration of the collision between Canada and the Jews, “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” novelist Mordecai Richler conjured Ephraim Gursky, a highly Bronfmanesque patriarch and explorer who so influences InuitRead More

You Must Not Remain Indifferent

By David Curzon

Deuteronomy 22:1-3 contains the admirable commandment to return any lost ox, sheep, ass or garment that you come across and, if necessary, to go out of your way to do this. And then, at the end of Deuteronomy 22:3, the point is generalized by a command that reads, in the older and more literal translations: “Thou mayest not hide thyself” andRead More